A Flexible Pressure Sensor Based on Conductive Silicone

At present, flexible sensors have been used in various technical fields. Compared with rigid sensors, flexible sensors have advantages of deformability and adaptability. However, the preparation time of most flexible sensors is too long and the preparation process is complex to be mass-produced. In this paper, based on silicone and carbon nanotubes, a novel method for fabricating flexible sensors is proposed. Sensors with good performance can be stably fabricated in a short time. The sensitivity of the sensor is further improved by embedding a hemispherical raised copper sheet. The results show that the sensor can be prepared rapidly and stably within 2 hours, maintain high sensitivity and linearity in the range of 10kPa to 50kPa, and can well follow the square wave signal at a certain pressure. The response time of the sensor is about 100ms, which can maintain a stable response output curve in the cyclic loading and unloading experiment of 30kPa and 1000 times. The sensor can also be integrated in the pneumatic soft gripper by using the manufacturing process to detect the hardness of the grasping object. In the detection experiments on four objects with different hardness, the final detection accuracy of the sensor is about 91.83%. The sensor fabricated by the novel method in this paper has good performance, which provides a certain preparation method and application reference for the design of flexible sensors, and is expected to be applied in many fields such as hardness perception, grasp detection and other fields.